How much does on-site duplicated content affect SERPs?

[WebmasterAlex]

Hi,

We've recently gotten into Moz, with our E-commerce websites, and discovered that it's crawler takes note of about 2500 pages which it thinks are the same (duplicated). We've now begun to completely rewrite every description of every product (including Meta Title/Description) so that this number may be reduced.

Since this is the biggest issue Moz spots I'm wondering what the effect of fixing it will be on our position in the SERP (mainly Google). Does anybody have some stories or experience about this topic?

Thanks in Advance!

Alexander

[DennisSeymour]

Depends on how fast your pages get crawled again, which depends on your niche and your domain trust as well.

Ive gotten badly optimised ecom sites to rank by just making great onpage seo changes. In a highly competitive space, you will see less "drastic" jumps but you'll still be able to see it. Be sure to add great unique content on your category pages ok?

[WebmasterAlex]

Yeah! We're re-doing all content! including categories, which we want to rank for their specific keywords of course

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

If the duplicate content was duplicated on other sites, then by rewriting the content and making it unique, you may see your site ranking for keywords you didn't rank for previously.  Google and Bing try to weed out duplicate content.  They prefer to just show one result with that content.  So, typically, they pick one of the pages that has the content, the one they think it the original, and they only include that page in the search results (at least in the first few pages).  So, if you're site was being kept out of the search results because Google didn't pick your site to display, you may now start to rank for those keywords.

As to how dramatic a change it will be for you, it depends on how competitive the keywords are, how well you optimize the pages, and how authoritative your website is.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

[WebmasterAlex]

Thanks for your insight! we're trying to get all of our pages rank A, according to Moz's on-page analyis, optimised for different keywords.